The Porous Self
Text | Image | Movement
Collections The Porous Self 2015-2023 Leafbirds 2012 Mapping 'Ulat Bansi' 2012 Installations Shiva-Shakti 2002 Earth Colours 1998 |
A practice research work developed during the years of my doctoral work on The Porous Self - Crafting an intrinsic ecological consciousness through text, image and movement
I have experienced a feeling of oneness with landscape and other beings over the years. It remained a deeply meaningful and personal experience from which my connection with the natural world deepened over the years. It led me to an interior space where I could not completely distinguish myself from the natural world and my identity. Porosity as a principle is one of the ways that allows us to experience our environment as a related whole, rather than as a divisive multiplicity. Our sensorial interactions with the world are continuously an exchange of energies, whether tactile, tacit or imperceptible. I began seeing porosity as a principle because I realized that all our senses were porous and permeable, our ability to feel emotions were porous, our ability to experience the world at large came from a capacity, sensuous as well as tacit exchanges of breath, being, understanding, emotional sharing, reflection and transforming ourselves in response to the environment around us. One of the keys to discovering porosity has been suspending the mental model that created a separatist frame of the human and the other. Being open to a more sensuous frame was integral to being able to experience another sense of reality. With this came the quest for alternative views of reality, different constructs of consciousness that would allow for a porous sense of being. I created a series of visual art works, poetry collections and paintings as part of my practice research. Select examples are displayed here. This is a curated collection that has emerged from the collections. The Porous Self: Inner Landscapes Today, as much as conservation focuses on the exterior landscapes, unless we mirror the vastness and the intricacy of networks of the exterior in our interiority, we are left with no connection, no language to truly communicate with the natural world intrinsically. This exhibition brings together the moments of seamless entwining of the inner and the outer, where ‘habitat’ extends into self, and self is part of the habitat that we conserve. In each place, we visit, we perceive, we engage with, we become, a species in conversation, in dialogue, in adaptation, in rest within the environment, being and becoming a part of the intricate network of life. To see ourselves as observers, distinct and different from these places and spaces, is to lose intrinsic beingness, a way of life, the very nature of our consciousness that makes us human. How do we re-engage with our own consciousness to conserve it? What new meanings does conservation begin to have, when we conserve this nature of mind, being, consciousness and the actions that stem from such a state of innerness? How do we see ourselves, the portraits of our self, when self is immersed in and as landscape and all beings that inhabit it? - In these quests, this series of paintings and writings come together to create visions of innerness, where melting, melding, suffusion, diffusion, amalgamation, immersion, permeation, and many other experiences of porosity happen. |